Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  More recent reports from the field were already previewing the consequences of the losses. All attending were familiar with the classic case of the kelp-saving sea otter, compliments of their colleague Jim Estes. Frightening reports of further ecological meltdown continued streaming north from John Terborgh’s predator-free forests in Venezuela.

  And there were yet more subtle cascades underway in the psychological realm. Joel Berger had spent most of his professional life studying the behavior of large mammals, from bighorns of the American Great Basin to black rhinos in the brushlands of Namibia. As an authority on big-prey species, Berger had taken a particular interest in the worldwide eradication of their predators. More specifically, Berger had evidence that even short-term absences of big predators could be deadly.

  Berger was headquartered on the flanks of the Grand Teton range in Wyoming, where for more than half a century—since the grizzlies and wolves were driven out—the moose and elk had been free of serious predators. He was there waiting and watching when, with the turn of the twenty-first century, a few grizzlies and wolves from their recovering refuge of Yellowstone started roaming back into the Tetons.

  Berger had an idea there would be trouble. He wasn’t looking for dramatic chase scenes or bloody battles. He was looking for those subtle sirens from the moose’s fight-or-flight alarm center—the twitch of a mane, the flare of a nostril, the raising of neck hair. These were visual cues requiring an unusual degree of intimacy between subject and observer—in Berger’s case a potentially dangerous level of proximity. To observe such levels of detail would require Berger to mingle with the moose. So to better mingle with the moose, Berger became one.

  Along with his research colleague and wife at the time, Carol Cunningham, Berger outfitted himself with a two-piece moose costume. Berger and Cunningham, head and tail, would sidle up to their subjects, concealing within their Trojan moose a multisensory armory of predator sounds and scents. They came armed with recordings of wolf howls; they carried snowballs soaked in wolf urine and authentic dungballs of bear. Lumbering within range, Berger—with the arm of a former semiprofessional baseball player—would toss the scent bombs under the noses of their subjects, and watch.

  When the first dung started flying, the authentic moose just stood there. When Berger broadcast the howls of the wolf, the moose hardly stirred. Rendered naïve by too much time in a land stripped of danger, the moose had forgotten the smell of the enemy, the alarm call of the wild. After two hundred thousand years of the moose keeping one step ahead of their lethal enemies, just a few generations apart had closed the gap.

  Berger later watched as wolves walked up on clueless mothers and carried off their calves.

  To the moose’s good fortune, the trauma of losing an offspring tended to reawaken dormant fears. To the sounds and smells of wolves, the ears began to twitch, the nostrils began to quiver, the hair on the mane stood on end. “Now they worry plenty,” reported Berger. “When they hear a wolf howl, they run.”

  Contrasting all the bad news from the world of vanishing predators was the brightening beacon of Yellowstone. Blossoming under the new watch of the wolf, Yellowstone was reminding many of what a landscape had to gain from rewilding—as well as the penalties it suffered for withholding. By the rewilders’ estimation, to risk attempting nothing on behalf of the missing beasts was to risk a depauperate world of weeds.

  Which brought the Ladder Dozen to the rather imposing quandary of resuscitating a countrywide graveyard of deceased species. Their answer was, in a word, proxies—close relatives and ecological equivalents that would serve as megafaunal stand-ins and rekindle the evolutionary embers. The country was already well stocked with potential candidates. Not too far from where the rewilders were sitting, in the Hill Country of Texas, some seventy-seven thousand large exotic mammals were already roaming within the expansive confines of game ranches—among them camels, cheetahs, and myriad species of African antelope. For that matter, even bygone mammoths and mastodons were available for repatriation, if one were to consider their elephantine cousins caged in zoos across the country.

  Here, by proxy, was a means of not only restoring North America’s megafauna but also providing a fail-safe for endangered megafauna of the world. Wild Bactrian camels, on the verge of extinction in their last hold-out in the Gobi desert, might find paradise in the prickly scrublands of the Southwest. Representatives of African and Asian elephants, both being slaughtered or swept aside in their home countries, could be protected too within American preserves. Here, finally, was a way to reawaken the sleeping predator, wherein cage-bound cheetahs and languishing lions might be turned out in fenced expanses to once again hone speed and wits in open pursuit of North America’s repatriated hoofstock.

  And there were obvious places where one could start to work: the vast open stretches of Great Plains steppe and Southwest scrubland. Though typically such country came laced with barbed wire and peopled with bad attitudes toward big carnivores, there was a good bet the prospects of tourist dollars funneling to otherwise dying rural economies might adjust some attitudes accordingly. If all went well with the trial runs, perhaps one day the fences could be moved back to accommodate grander arenas—Pleistocene parks, they would be called—in the widest unpeopled spaces of western America. One could imagine elephants crushing creosote in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico, lions stalking wild horses through Colorado short-grass, cheetahs chasing pronghorn through the Red Desert of Wyoming.

  Such was the essence of the rewilders’ ultimate vision. It had fences and fail-safes and experimental designs, it had humble admissions of problems yet unsolved, and it had hope. And by that Sunday night at Ladder Ranch, it had a draft with twelve signatories.

  The stately journal Nature accepted the rewilders daring post, albeit a version drastically slashed and squeezed to fit as a two-page commentary. As the top two of the paper’s listed coauthors, Donlan and Greene would naturally be the first in line to receive any public inquiries. Though both were battle-savvy veterans of the publishing process, neither was prepared for what was to come. Jim Estes, still freshly bruised from the stoning he received after suggesting that whalers might have triggered an ecological collapse in the North Pacific, had to wince over the drubbing he saw coming to his rewilding friends and coauthors from Cornell. “This whaling thing is small potatoes compared to rewilding,” he warned them. “When this thing hits the street, you guys better put on your flak jackets.”

  Word went out, and word quickly came back, flooding Greene and Donlan’s e-mail boxes with vitriol. News bureaus on both sides of the Atlantic swooped in, smelling blood. Amid a few tepid nods of approval from adventurous ranchers and high-spirited laypublic, the jeers resounded.

  “Impossible.”

  “Pure fantasy.”

  “A terrible and absurd idea.”

  African patriots savaged the American rewilders for their imperialistic gall. One wrote, “Thank you for planning to rob Africa of her animals so you can beautify your barren great plains with her native animals!! Why come after the animals that support our tourism. Leave Africa and what is hers alone, thief!!!!!!!” (This despite the authors having mentioned five times in the space of two pages their intentions to use captive animals already living in America.)

  Some in their imaginations painted Donlan and Greene as pointy-headed, ivory-tower idealists. Greene, a former army ambulance driver and impassioned handler of lethal vipers, and Donlan, whose field résumé included firing half a million rounds of live ammunition in the name of conservation, could only blink in astonishment.

  Academics, some with offices just down the hall from Greene’s and Donlan’s, ganged up to chide their colleagues in print. Fourteen conservation biologists, including three senior scientists from the Nature Conservancy, signed on to a letter in Nature declaring the rewilding vision the wrong vision. Four others published a paper rating the rewilding proposal as only slightly less sensational than Jurassic Park, a fantasy novel and
film in which sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaurs are brought back to life and begin eating people.

  “I’m shocked that that even made it into print,” said Donlan. “I mean, how many times does ten thousand years go into sixty-five million?”

  Added Greene, “It’s not a stretch to say that they mostly thought we were going to come dump a bunch of elephants on the suburbs of Topeka.”

  Amid all the scoffings and scoldings, Donlan and Greene were struck by the eerie silence in response to their central challenge. Nobody had addressed their premise, in which the absence of big predators and prey had lit an ecological and aesthetic time bomb. “That to me is the disappointing thing,” said Donlan. “The papers that have come out so far are to some extent ridiculous. It’s clear that there are huge challenges and huge obstacles to this idea, but in my opinion they haven’t been discussed. Everyone’s dancing around outside of this main issue.”

  It was particularly suspicious that nobody had made noise concerning previous like-minded efforts to restore butterflies, birds, and tortoises to places they no longer or had never lived. Nobody seemed concerned about northern Siberia, where the Russian ecologist Sergey Zimov was by then already deep into a Pleistocene rewilding experiment of his own, returning wild horses and bison and musk oxen to the bereft tundra. Nobody made a peep over one of the rewilders’ own featured candidates, a Pleistocene relic the size of a coffee table named the Bolson tortoise, rescued from a holdout in Mexico and already thumping about the Ladder Ranch.

  In the end it was the idea of the big and the dangerous returning to America’s outskirts that had primed the explosion. One letter writer declared, “If an Elephant ever comes tromping through my yard it’ll get an ass full of buckshot.”

  But ultimately, it was the lion that lit the powder keg:

  “You are a fucking moron if you release killers in our homeland. I hope the cattle rancher guys shoot your ass or feed you to those lions if you release those killers into our ecosystem.”

  “I know we’ll all appreciate it when are [sic] kids are eaten alive at a campsite, or when we get gobbled up while taking a hike.”

  “If they get near me, my family, friends or my property then I’ll be ‘really careful’ when I place the crosshairs on them and slowly squeeze the trigger of my Remington 300 UltraMag. Are you sane?”

  ELEVEN

  The Loneliest Predator

  A risk-free world is a very dull world, one from which we are apt to learn little of consequence.

  —Geerat Vermeij

  IN A QUIETER MOMENT, two years after inciting international hysteria with their notions of repatriating North America’s missing megafauna, Josh Donlan and Harry Greene sat down to reflect. In recalling the response—as one might try recalling the driver of the bus that had flattened them—they sifted through the blitzkrieg’s rubble of radio spots, newspaper editorials, Jumanji cartoons and Jurassic Park jokes, the smoldering stacks of e-mail and whisperings in the hallways. Whatever noble message they might have intended, a far more menacing one had ultimately been received. The masses, skimming all the pros and cons and scientific protocols that the rewilders had painstakingly weaved into their message of revival and hope, had slashed and twisted the entirety to a sound bite of reply: No lions in my backyard. Donlan and Greene had at least identified the driver of the bus, and its name was fear.

  For all the care given to laying out the ecological case for the big and dangerous beasts, the rewilders had underestimated the power the great predators still wielded over their own particular species. Rewilding had challenged the topmost survivor among the megafauna to consider lightening up its forty-thousand-year death grip. It had reopened ancient and frightening territory, in minds that subconsciously were still walking the plains naked among Pleistocene lions.

  The Meat of Man

  Some two million years before the first utterance of rewilding, a clan of apes swung down from the branches on the sere edge of the East African savanna and set out, in fits and starts, on foot across the open plain. They had unimpressive fangs and nothing in the way of claws one could call weapons. Their leg speed was laughable. Yet by venturing into the open, they were venturing into competition with an accomplished cast of the fleetest and most fearsome carnivores on the planet.

  Out among a bristling menagerie of lions and hyenas, saber-toothed cats, wild dogs, and leopards, their forays might be construed as those of a fool or thrillseeker, some ancient progenitor of the modern rodeo clown. The walking apes were in fact pioneers of necessity. They had been pitched headlong into the Pleistocene’s turbulent era of shrinking woodlands and spreading grasslands, their sanctuaries of trees receding into isolated pockets. Like tadpoles in an evaporating puddle, they either had to grow legs or lay exposed to the mercy of the elements.

  Lacking brawn, the apes needed pluck and hustle to succeed at what would become a pirating life in plain view. Hunting for meat and marrow out on the naked spaces, the odd, two-legged newcomers learned to scan the horizons for descending vultures, to listen for the roar of lions, to track spoor on the run. If they could not subdue it, they would scavenge it. Competing with jackals and hyenas and vultures, veterans of the trade, they raced to reach the carcass first. And with time and hunger and a few tricks borrowed from the competition, they eventually learned to bully and bluff their way to the prize.

  Somehow these sorry contenders had made camp in the gladiator’s arena and lived to brag about it. The descendants of the skinny, odd simian would come to number six and a half billion people, swarming over nearly every foothold of terrestrial habitat on Earth, to the highest peaks and farthest poles and deepest oceanic trenches. They would eventually wield the power to level mountains, to dam the biggest rivers, to coat entire continents in concrete and crops, to alter the climate as it had once altered them. And before they were through, they would vanquish their old predatorial contenders to zoos and artificial reserves, to the slums and refugee camps and Siberian outposts of nature.

  Some would mark the defining moment of human history by the first domestications of grains and beasts some ten thousand years ago. Yet the agricultural revolution was not some sudden blossoming of inspired genius but rather the inevitable expression of creative talents honed over the long haul of the Pleistocene. They were talents honed in the heat of competition with that cast of fierce predators, which not only challenged the upright ape to keep itself fed, but to keep it from becoming the food.

  In 1924, in a cave on the edge of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, a miner named de Bruyn discovered a skull that was soon hailed as the missing link. It had once belonged to a small, round-headed creature with little teeth and big, forward-peering, lively eyes—a child, three to four years old, weighing maybe twenty-five pounds, with a brain as big as a large gorilla’s. Formally called Australopithecus africanus—the Southern ape—the child was nicknamed Taung, after a nearby railway station. And the paleontologist who chaperoned the Taung child into stardom, a spirited South African named Raymond Dart, declared that this immediate ancestor to the human line was a skull-smashing, blood-spilling killer supreme.

  Dart, whose exploits were later glamorized by New York playwright Robert Ardrey in his book African Genesis, had examined the Taung child along with other early australopithecine man-creatures, in the context of the caves where they had come to rest. Their surroundings, eventually dated to more than two million years ago, had sealed the remains of thousands of other creatures who had visited or been dragged into the cave in their time. There were bones of antelope, baboons, hippopotamuses, giraffes, porcupines, jackals, and hyenas.

  Most critically, to Dart’s eyes, was the unusual preponderance of antelope leg bones, their knobby knees the likeness of a club. Nearby lay the dented skulls of baboons, and hence, by Dart’s elementary deduction, the marks of violent death at the weapon-wielding hands of these vicious little ape-men. Dart’s hypothesis of murder and mayhem at the root of man’s ancestry, dripping of Ardrey’s melodra
ma, captivated a huge lay audience.

  It drew a cooler reception from Dart’s colleagues, who found it hard to swallow the incongruence of this supposed two-legged terror. This, after all, was a line of man-apes barely five feet tall, with teeth and claws of vestigial vegetarians, and little more than sticks and stones in the way of armament.

  Who, then, was this bipedal creature striding so straight and cocky among the megabeasts of the African veldt? After reexamining the cave massacres in detail, a fellow South African paleontologist named C. K. Brain came back suggesting a chest-deflating alter ego to Dart’s killer ape. Brain agreed that many of the cave bones had indeed been contributed by predators, but by more conventional, four-legged carnivores. He added one other observation that turned Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis on its head. He produced a fragment of Australopithecus skull, much like the Taung child’s, bearing two arresting puncture holes. Borrowing a bit of Dart’s own showmanship, Brain produced the jaw of a fossil leopard and neatly fitted the cat’s two lower fangs into the holes in the little ape-child’s skull. The murderous little meat hunter had suddenly become the meat.

  Man the Scavenger

  Over the decades, the pendulum of opinion on humanity’s predatorial heritage swung between the extremes, between Dart’s meat-eating monster and Brain’s skulking scavenger. But from either perspective, the artist’s reconstruction of the human beginnings took on the richly hued background of blood red. There had undoubtedly been protohumans walking the mean streets of prehistoric East Africa. They had left behind hip bones and craniums whose attachments and orientations could only subscribe to an upright, vertical mode of existence. In the ancient ash bed of a Tanzanian volcano, they had left footprints more than three million years old, bipedaling across the plain of Laetoli. One way or another, the protohuman was out there competing in the open among big and dangerous beasts, and winning its share of the contests.